The advertising industry is seeing substantial developments and transformations around the world. In particular, a greater percentage of overall worldwide marketing spending is shifting from traditional offline media such as print, television, billboards and venues to online media such as the Internet, mobile apps, Internet access networks, Internet television, etc. This is happening for two primary reasons—firstly, a greater percentage of consumer “eyeballs” are shifting from offline to online media. Secondly, the online media affords much greater ability to measure and manage advertising programs and placements, such that advertisers are able to get greater return on investment, and engage in more performance-based marketing practices. Digital advertising, as the various forms of online or interactive advertising are commonly described, is thus becoming an increasing percentage of the overall advertising market. With this trend, the requirement to provide better and better targeting, relevance and harmony with content continues to get stronger in order to provide greater value to end-users, better return-on-investment for advertisers, and better site loyalty and monetization for publishers.
Within Digital Advertising, the two largest categories currently are Display Advertising and Search Advertising. Display advertising refers to any type of banner ads, audio ads, video ads, animation ads, etc. where the ad unit (a piece or an item of advertising) is presented on the publisher media based on some filtering conditions specified by the advertiser or the publisher. These filtering conditions might include current information, such as the location of the user, the date and time of the ad serving, as well as historical information, such as the sites the user has been on prior to coming to this publisher's media, the user's past click and purchase behavior on this and other media, etc. Advertisers and publishers are finding that the better the targeting of an ad, the better its performance for all parties.
Search advertising refers to a major innovation brought about by Google™ Bing™ and other “horizontal” search engines. These horizontal search engines came up with new and better ways to sort and categorize the entire Internet by keywords, or groups of words typed in by users to find information they were interested in. The search engines were so effective for users that they quickly became the dominant entry points for users looking to get on the Internet. Google and other search sites then introduced a major innovation in the world of advertising, and that was to use the keywords typed in by users searching for information to select the ads to present. Subsequently, they also added the ability to serve up ads filtered out by the static content of any web site, not just Google or Bing itself. Furthermore, they changed ad formats from predominantly banner based to predominantly text based, as a further message to users about relevance and contextualization, rather than intrusiveness of display. By enhancing the contextualization and presentation of ads, the search engines were able to greatly shift advertising spend from offline and display ads to search ads.
Advances in information technology, and business requirements for continually better performance continue to bring changes and challenges to online advertising. Consequently, there is always room for improvement and innovation.